Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition rules refresher

Read the refresher

You win by being the first to ten victory points, earned almost entirely by completing objectives.

A quick word on setup. One player gets the speaker token and goes first in the strategy phase. Everyone takes their faction sheet, their home system, their starting technologies and starting units listed on the back of the sheet, and sets their command sheet with three tokens in the tactic pool, three in the fleet pool, and two in the strategy pool. Each player draws one secret objective and keeps it hidden. The speaker lays out five stage one objectives face down above the victory point track and five stage two objectives face down below it, then reveals the first two stage one objectives. The custodians token goes on Mecatol Rex in the centre. All eight strategy cards sit in the middle within reach of the speaker. In a five player game, the player closest to two other players starts with four extra trade goods, the two players on either side of them start with two extra trade goods each, and the remaining two players get nothing extra.

Each round has four phases. In the strategy phase, starting with the speaker and going clockwise, each player picks one strategy card. If you are playing with three or four players, go around a second time so everyone holds two cards, and your lowest numbered card sets your place in initiative order. Any card that nobody picked gets a trade good from the speaker, and whoever takes that card in a later round collects the trade goods on it.

Then the action phase. Players take turns in initiative order, lowest number first, repeating around and around until everyone has passed. On your turn you take exactly one action. It is either a strategic action, a tactical action, or a component action.

A strategic action is resolving the primary ability of your strategy card. After you finish, each other player in turn may resolve the secondary ability, usually by spending a token from their strategy pool. Then you flip the card face down to exhaust it. You may not use your own card's secondary ability.

A component action is an action printed on a card, a technology, or your faction sheet, anything beginning with the word Action.

A tactical action is the big one, and it has five steps in order. First, activation: take a command token from your tactic pool and place it on a system. That is now the active system. You cannot activate a system that already holds one of your own command tokens, and you cannot do this at all with an empty tactic pool. Second, movement: move any of your ships into the active system from any number of other systems, obeying their move values. Ships carry fighters and ground forces up to their capacity. After the ships have moved, every player, including you, may fire the space cannon abilities of their units in the active system at your ships. Third, space combat, if two players now have ships there. Fourth, invasion. Fifth, production: if you have a space dock in the active system, spend resources to produce units, up to the combined production value of your units there.

Space combat runs in rounds. First round only, anti-fighter barrage. Then either player may announce a retreat, which does not happen until the end of that round. Then both roll one die per ship, comparing to each unit's combat value, and hits are assigned by the owner, destroying one of their own ships per hit. Then retreats happen. If both sides still have ships, another round begins with announcing retreats. To retreat, all your ships go to one adjacent system with no enemy ships that contains either a planet you control or at least one of your units, and you place a command token there if you don't have one.

Invasion also runs in order. Bombardment first, against planets holding enemy ground forces. Then commit ground forces from the space area down onto planets. Then the defender's space cannon defense, from a PDS on that planet, and those hits are assigned to the landing ground forces. Then ground combat, rolling and assigning hits the same way, round after round until one side is wiped out. Then establish control: you take the planet card exhausted, and any enemy structures there are destroyed.

Here are the things people often forget. You cannot pass during the action phase until your strategy card is exhausted, and in a three or four player game, until both of them are. You cannot move units out of a system that contains one of your own command tokens, and a ship can never move through a system containing another player's ships. Your fleet pool is the maximum number of non-fighter ships you may have in any single system, and if you exceed it you must return ships to your reinforcements. You cannot score a public objective at all unless you control every planet in your home system. And you may score at most one public objective and one secret objective per status phase, and likewise one of each per step of the action phase. One more: you may produce at a space dock in the active system even if you moved nothing and invaded nothing, but a space dock sharing a system with another player's ships is blockaded and can only produce ground forces.

After everyone passes, the status phase runs eight steps in order. Score objectives, in initiative order. Reveal the next public objective, and no stage two objective is revealed until all five stage one objectives are out. Everyone draws an action card. Everyone removes all their command tokens from the board. Everyone gains two command tokens and may redistribute the tokens on their command sheet between pools. Ready all exhausted cards. Repair damaged units. Return strategy cards.

Then, if the custodians token is still on Mecatol Rex, a new round begins. To take it, the active player must spend six influence immediately before landing ground forces on Mecatol Rex. Doing so gains them one victory point, and from that round onward the agenda phase is added at the end of every round. In the agenda phase you reveal an agenda, vote starting with the player left of the speaker and going clockwise, exhausting planets for their influence, and resolve the outcome with the most votes. The speaker breaks any tie among tied outcomes. Do that twice, then ready all planet cards.

The game ends immediately when a player reaches ten victory points, and that player wins. It can also end early: if the speaker would reveal a public objective and there are none left, the game ends at once and the player with the most victory points wins, with ties going to whoever is earliest in initiative order.

A turn, played out

It is your turn in the action phase. Your strategy card is already exhausted, so you could pass, but you have 2 tokens in your tactic pool and 3 in your fleet pool. Next to your home system sits a planet held by the player to your left, with 1 of their ground forces and a PDS on it, and no ships in space. You take a token from your tactic pool and place it on that system. It is now active, and your tactic pool is down to 1. You move 3 ships in from your home system, which is adjacent, so their move values reach. They carry 4 ground forces within their capacity. You have a fourth ship one system over, but you put a command token there earlier this round, so it cannot leave. It would not help anyway, because your fleet pool of 3 caps your non-fighter ships in one system. Now the PDS fires its space cannon at your arriving ships and misses. No enemy ships are here, so there is no space combat. On to invasion. There is no bombardment, so you commit all 4 ground forces to the planet. The PDS fires again as space cannon defense and hits once. That hit lands on your landing troops, so 3 remain. Ground combat: you roll 3 dice against their 1. You score 1 hit, they miss, and their last ground force is destroyed. You take the planet card exhausted, and their PDS is destroyed. With no space dock here, there is nothing to produce.